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Coast and then a coal barge coming out of the Great Lakes and then down to Norfolk and then New York again. Once he thought he'd be a chef but though he'd been a ship's cook no one wanted him in the good kitchens. He was a helper once in a fancy restaurant but they fired him after two days when he came in smelling of alcohol and he waited in the alley and slugged the chef when he came out for a smoke and that got him 90 days but didn't stop him from brawling and boozing until he felt the juices draining out of him. John was starting to lose confidence in himself. He figured this was his last chance. He had no real friends now. There were a couple of people in the building he said hello to but that was it. It was just a rooming house with a lot of transients that he rented by the month instead of by the night or week. He was glad he had his day off in the middle of the week. When he'd had his day off on Sundays he'd go nuts and spend the day reading the papers and watching TV. Now 
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he went into Manhattan from time to time and walked around. There were plenty of good-looking women in Manhattan in expensive-looking clothes but he couldn't get near them. That was why he wanted to win all those millions of dollars. Charlie wanted to take the family to Disney World when the commissions started coming in again but the experience in New York had made his wife balky about traveling. She liked it just fine where she was and the kids would just as soon spend their time with their friends. They went to Graceland instead. Charlie regretted that he would go through life without seeing Disney World and started thinking about all the other things he'd never done. He'd started working on the lot just a few years after getting out of high school and had married Ginny soon after and they had bought the little house with the seedy lawn and that was it. They'd had a fine old time for a couple of years and then the kids had come and they had settled in and twenty  |
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